Last year on this blog

  1. blog

So this blog is now celebrating its 21st birthday (or 20 if you count from zero, or 18 if you want to be pedantic), and I figured I would do this yearly thing of reviewing how that went.

Number of posts

2022 was the official 20th anniversary in any case, and that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison, was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened!

Well, I was busy with other things, mostly away from keyboard, that I will not bore you with here...

The other thing that happened is that the one-liner I used to collect stats was broken (it counted folders and other unrelated files) and wildly overestimated 2022! Turns out I didn't write that much then:

anarc.at$ ls blog | grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*.md' | se
d s/-.*// | sort | uniq -c  | sort -n -k2
     57 2005
     43 2006
     20 2007
     20 2008
      7 2009
     13 2010
     16 2011
     11 2012
     13 2013
      5 2014
     13 2015
     18 2016
     29 2017
     27 2018
     17 2019
     18 2020
     14 2021
     28 2022
     10 2023
      1 2024

But even that is inaccurate because, in ikiwiki, I can tag any page as being featured on the blog. So we actually need to process the HTML itself because we don't have much better on hand without going through ikiwiki's internals:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/ | grep 'href="\./' | grep -o 20[0-9][0-9] | sort | uniq -c 
     56 2005
     42 2006
     19 2007
     18 2008
      6 2009
     12 2010
     15 2011
     10 2012
     11 2013
      3 2014
     15 2015
     32 2016
     50 2017
     37 2018
     19 2019
     19 2020
     15 2021
     28 2022
     13 2023

Which puts the top 10 years at:

$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/ | grep 'href="\./' | grep -o 20[0-9][0-9] | sort | uniq -c  | sort -nr | head -10
     56 2005
     50 2017
     42 2006
     37 2018
     32 2016
     28 2022
     19 2020
     19 2019
     19 2007
     18 2008

Anyway. 2023 is certainly not a glorious year in that regard, in any case.

Visitors

In terms of visits, however, we had quite a few hits. According to Goatcounter, I had 122 300 visits in 2023! 2022, in comparison, had 89 363, so that's quite a rise.

What you read

I seem to have hit the Hacker News front page at least twice. I say "seem" because it's actually pretty hard to tell what the HN frontpage actually is on any given day. I had 22k visits on 2023-03-13, in any case, and you can't see me on the front that day. We do see a post of mine on 2023-09-02, all the way down there, which seem to have generated another 10k visits.

In any case, here were the most popular stories for you fine visitors:

Everything else was published before 2023. Replacing Smokeping with Prometheus is still around and Looking at Wayland terminal emulators makes an entry in the top five.

Where you've been

People send less and less private information when they browse the web. The number of visitors without referrers was 41% in 2021, it rose to 44% in 2023. Most of the remaining traffic comes from Google, but Hacker News is now a significant chunk, almost as big as Google.

In 2021, Google represented 23% of my traffic, in 2022, it was down to 15% so 18% is actually a rise from last year, even if it seems much smaller than what I usually think of.

Ratio Referrer Visits
18% Google 22 098
13% Hacker News 16 003
2% duckduckgo.com 2 640
1% community.frame.work 1 090
1% missing.csail.mit.edu 918

Note that Facebook and Twitter do not appear at all in my referrers.

Where you are

Unsurprisingly, most visits still come from the US:

Ratio Country Visits
26% United States 32 010
14% France 17 046
10% Germany 11 650
6% Canada 7 425
5% United Kingdom 6 473
3% Netherlands 3 436

Those ratios are nearly identical to last year, but quite different from 2021, where Germany and France were more or less reversed.

Back in 2021, I mentioned there was a long tail of countries with at least one visit, with 160 countries listed. I expanded that and there's now 182 countries in that list, almost all of the 193 member states in the UN.

What you were

Chrome's dominance continues to expand, even on readers of this blog, gaining two percentage points from Firefox compared to 2021.

Ratio Browser Visits
49% Firefox 60 126
36% Chrome 44 052
14% Safari 17 463
1% Others N/A

It seems like, unfortunately, my Lynx and Haiku users have not visited in the past year. It seems like trying to read those metrics is like figuring out tea leaves...

In terms of operating systems:

Ratio OS Visits
28% Linux 34 010
23% macOS 28 728
21% Windows 26 303
17% Android 20 614
10% iOS 11 741

Again, Linux and Mac are over-represented, and Android and iOS are under-represented.

What is next

I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world...

So anyway, thanks for coming, faithful reader, and see you in the coming 2024 year...

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Created . Edited .